Brain Waves Blog

There’s a new kind of crisis on campus—the social media crisis. You know the one, the email interaction that gets posted to reddit, the tweet-gone-awry from an official account, or the local news story that catches the eye of someone influential online. Before you know it, a snafu that might have slipped under the radar in the past has sparked a national conversation, and there are literally thousands of people talking about the campus every day.

We’re in the age of digital disruption—a time when social media newsfeeds are more competitive than the 2018 NBA Finals. A time when we should analyze our approach to content as rigorously as we select an engagement ring, well maybe not that rigorously but you get my point. All jokes aside, for whatever reason, so many entities today focus on producing the ‘what’ that they often forget to consider the ‘how’ in content creation.

Higher education institutions of the future are prepared to identify and share their value with a variety of audiences—from students to donors to federal and state agencies and more. They know and advocate for their brand tirelessly and constantly evolve to meet the changing educational needs of the population. In short, the higher education institution of the future is equipped to drive growth in programs, enrollment, and advancement in ways that are efficient and innovative.

When you’re recruiting prospective students, you want to know what they’re saying about your university. One way you can learn what students are saying is through traditional audience research methods, social audience intelligence, or a combination of both. The research analysts at Brandwatch used social data to learn more about prospective student conversations surrounding applying to college.

If you ended up here, chances are you’ve thought about social listening. Whether you’re at the beginning stages of your research or actively trying to make the case to invest resources in it, social listening has found its way onto your radar.

The data gold rush is on in higher ed advancement, and institutions hope to hit pay dirt by leveraging this data bonanza—whether it’s identifying alumni career journeys to better match mentors to mentees or discovering alumni interests to better target communications and fundraising. But unless advancement offices have a strong strategy backed by defined and talented resources, they’ll be left with little but a server full of fool’s gold.